Les Miserables

Growing up, my sister and I loved musicals.  Our favorite was Les Miserables (aka Les Mis) and it's still my favorite today.  There are so many complex themes in the musical - love, forgiveness, morality, death, ethics, suicide, war, God, redemption, hope - and the songs are so powerful.  Back before law school started, I decided I wanted to read Les Mis, the novel, by Victor Hugo.  My original goal was to finish it during the summer before law school.  Needless to say, that didn't happen and my new goal is to finish it before law school ends!  The book is 1,460 pages long.  I can only read it during summer break, winter break and spring break, because I just don't have time during the school year to read it.  I'm proud to say I'm on page 968 currently; less than 500 pages to go.

As an adult, I've enjoyed finding complex themes from the book, hidden in the lyrics and music of the musical.  But as a child, I loved Les Mis for a completely different reason.  Les Mis has a lot of bad words in it.  Most of them are in the very comical "Master of the House" song.  My parents, not wanting to stifle our creativity and interest in the arts, decided to let us listen to the songs.  The agreement was, if you were singing along to Les Mis, you got to say the bad words out loud.  So Haley and I played "Master of the House" over and over again.  My dad figured that he'd rather listen to a musical than whatever Madonna song was popular at the time, so they'd just shake their heads when we'd belt out the curse words (and there were quite a few).  Now, keep in mind, I was introduced to Les Mis when I was about 10 years old and Haley was 5, so getting to sing curse words in front of our parents was a big deal.  And I actually think it was a good way to desensitize us to curse words.  When my friends would use those words behind their parents back, it really wasn't a big deal to me - I'd already heard them, and said them, and it wasn't that cool to say because I could do it in front of my parents.  So throughout my childhood and my teens, I actually cursed the least in conversation among all my friends.  I hardly ever did it, because it was way more fun to just sing the bad words in Les Mis in front of my parents.